


Lifetimes

by steelneena



Series: Widomauk Week 2k19: With A Twist [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: BUT with the intention that it be fixed, M/M, Time Shenanigans, contains canonical character death, on the way to a fix it, widomaukweek2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 00:37:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19051708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/pseuds/steelneena
Summary: Prompt 1: Reunions





	Lifetimes

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to try and do as many of the prompts as possible. All of them contain some sort of weird twist.  
> This one is a mite sad but with the implication of good things to come, and I promise you that, in my head at least, they absolutely do come to fruition.

The day is dark. All days are dark in the fair city of Rohsona. But they’re beautiful all the same. Caleb makes his way through the streets, thinking back fondly on everything that had occurred there in times past. About all the people they’d met, the things they’d done - heroic, stupid and dumbassery all - and about how, against all odds, he’d come to call that strange place home, even though he’d sought for so long to save something he’d already lost long before.

Now, the Empire is little more than a shadow on Caleb’s heart. There are more important things in life than loyalty to a nation. And he’s done all he can to prove that he know it to be true. He’d worked so hard, so long, and now, Caleb thinks for once that he’s managed to fix everything. It’ll all be alright. His parents are still alive somewhere, happy, for once. The world didn’t end. Molly had never been killed, Beau hadn’t died.

Everything is fine now.

They hadn’t all dropped one by one, flies all on the battlefields that once hosted the Calamity, and nearly hosted a second.

(And Uk’atoa remains still safely in his cage).

Caleb is happy; he feels light and weightless; Dunamantic magic trails off of him like he’s made of it, as though his essence and the grey, star field glow are one in the same. Some things are permanent and some things are not and when he plays with time, he knows it. He knows it all too well.

But the house is still there. Privately, he still calls it the MT House, because it had always felt empty without Molly there.

But now, he will be there. They all will. He’s done everything right, he knows it.

There is the house, with the giant tree at the top, beautiful and alluring and so, so foreign to the dark lands of Xhorhaas. He doesn’t question it. Caduceus should still be with them, even if he didn’t arrive there the way he was supposed to. Privately pleased, hands behind his back, Caleb strides up to the door and knocks.

He should probably be surprised by who answers.

Somehow, for all he’d bolstered himself, for his prodigious talent, the painful truth had never really crossed his mind as being a possibility.

There, before him, stands himself.

Caleb Widogast, of the red hair and the blue eyes and the pale skin. Surprisingly, Caleb doesn’t blink an eye, odd when met with ones older self, face to face.

“Hallo, what can we do for you today, my friend?”

“Ah, well I am here to see all of you,” he hedges with a slight, polite smile. “May I come in?”

“Certainly.”

He lets himself in.

It’s a different turn of phrase than he anticipated.

Looking at himself like this is strange. He’s so, so young, and bright eyed. Bushy-tailed even, for all the dark circles under his eyes and the thinness of his pale skin that soft blue veins visible pulse not far beneath the surface.

Caleb Widogast in his youth had been like a flame, burning bright, blown out once, but rekindled.

_Ready to be blown out again._

“But not this time,” he whispers under his breath, looking to where his own deep plum robes billow about his feet.

“Pardon me?” The young Caleb turns around and asks him.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he replies with a simple smile.

The young Caleb eyes him warily. “I will call the others.”

Content, Caleb folds his arms within the folds of his cloak and waits, looking around.

The room he is left in is sparse. He remembers when it used to look like this, plain as the day they moved in, before Jester had run of the whole lot. There’s even the faint whiff of burning chemicals that signals out to him that Veth - though now she is Nott once again, and perhaps he ought to see to that - and Yeza are still together in their little laboratory, no doubt making incredible things together, smiling endlessly as their fingers brush over the phials that they pass back and forth.

Eventually, his younger self returns, bringing them all forth.

Caleb waits.

None of them blink twice.

He waits longer.

His heart sinks.

Mollymauk does not arrive.

After everything, after all the heartache, after learning what he had about -

But Caleb steels himself from showing his frustration, his agony, his disappointment.

He’s just about to open his mouth and ask after the one he’s had his heart hung up on for so long when Fjord steps up to speak.

“You wished to talk with us? What can we do for Den Thelyss today, Shadowhand?”

Caleb reels internally, lifts his hands outward to look at them, to see slender, grayish purple fingers with dark nails, and the fine, almost imperceptible dusting of white hairs over his knuckles that undoubtedly belong to Shadowhand Essek Thelyss.

This is _not_ what was supposed to happen.

This is _not_ what he wanted.

But they’re all looking at him expectantly, and he wracks his brain, back and back and back, now, he realizes, tens of years, to this very moment, when he was his younger self, looking back expectantly, waiting to know what their next mission would be.

And he realizes that, though he may never have the chance he hoped for (visions of pressing a tender kiss to the back of a much more purple set of knuckles dance in his mind’s eye) he _can_ help his younger self to do what he could not.

Perhaps that’s why.

Perhaps it was always meant to be.

“You are one two few for the task I have to set you. Have you another person you could recruit to your ranks?”

They look to one another, and when Yasha steps forward, he already knows that the world is course correcting, the timeline falling into place.

Before he leaves, he turns to his younger self, his old self, of bygone body and mind, and eyes him sternly.

“I have more magic to teach you, if you are up to the task.”

“I am always up to the task.”

 _Yes,_ he thinks to, and about himself. _You are._

 


End file.
